Richard Dawkins on the Labelling of Children

I feel very strongly that it’s wrong to label children with the opinions of their parents.

Nobody minds labelling a child an English child, or a French child, or a Dutch child. But you’d think I was mad if I started talking about aÂ post-modernistÂ child, or a Keynesian child, or a monetarist child, or a liberal child, or a conservative child.

And yet the whole of our society quite happily buys into the idea that you can talk about a Catholic child, or a Protestant child, or a Muslim child, or a Hindu child. That’s surely got to be wrong; to assume that a child will automatically inherit the opinions of its parents about the universe, the cosmos and morality. This must be something that should be rectified.